Completely Ordinary
by Bonsoir
Summary: She knows he doesn't like to think about what happened; he even hates it when other people ask her about it—how it was, how it felt—and she thinks maybe that's why he's never asked her, himself. Maybe he's just glad she's alive and doesn't want to remember the almosts. (Anna talks to Kristoff about her choice to save her sister instead of herself.)


**Title:** Completely Ordinary  
**Characters:** Anna, Kristoff, mention of Elsa  
**Genre:** Romance, Angst  
**Words:** 2,147  
**Notes: **Anna's line in the film about being "completely ordinary" stuck out to me, so this piece is a dialogue-driven narrative that deals with insecurity and normalcy. It's also my first foray into the _Frozen_ fandom. After re-writing this once and re-reading it a million times, I can't look at it anymore, so feedback of any sort would be very much appreciated.

* * *

"Hey."

Kristoff looks up at her from a pile of hay in the loft of the stables. He's sitting up before she can clear her skirts of the ladder. "Anna," he says, surprise in his voice. "What are you doing here?"

"Well, it's a funny story. You see, a number of years ago, a king and queen who loved each other very much decided that they wanted a second child, so they—"

He falls back against the hay with a groan, and she grins, but it slips away from her face as she runs her fingers over one of her braids. "Can I talk to you? I mean, about _something_?"

She can't say it—"something _important"_—because she's not sure if it's really important, or if she's just being ridiculous.

He shifts his gaze to her face at the tone in her voice, or maybe for a different reason. She's not sure—never really completely sure about anything anymore.

When he doesn't any anything right away, she hurries to elaborate, "I just—I can't talk to Elsa about it, not this."

"But you can talk to me?" His words are thick with interest, and he sits back up.

"Well, if, uhm… If you'll let me."

A smile plays at the corners of his mouth. "When did you ever need permission to talk?"

She blushes and hopes that her reddened skin doesn't make her freckles stand out too much. "Well," she begins, twisting her braid around her fingers, "this is about the whole…not-being-completely-ordinary-anymore…thing."

"I'm pretty sure that you were _never_ completely ordinary."

It's a joke about her personality and weird habits, she knows, but she can't let herself laugh at it, not this time. Instead, she falls down into the hay next to him. "I was," she says, "until I froze to—well, froze into an ice sculpture out there on the fjord."

"Oh." She knows he doesn't like to think about what happened; he even hates it when other people ask her about it—how it was, how it felt—and she thinks maybe that's why he's never asked her, himself. Maybe he's just glad she's alive and doesn't want to remember the almosts.

She needs to talk about it, though. "I know people ask me about it all the time, but I just—I don't exactly tell them…the truth?" She winces at the tone of her own voice; she hadn't intended that to be a question.

"What?" He's giving her that look, the one she really can't put words to. Maybe it's confusion or fear, but it could be something else. "Anna, if it's—I mean, if it's too much, you don't have to talk about it. I thought you knew that."

"I _want_ to, though," she assures him. "Need to. Talk about it, I mean. I just. I want someone to know the truth, and it can't be Elsa. She's so much better now, but you know how anxious she gets, and I just… It would be cruel to remind her. I can't make her feel bad just so I'll feel a little better."

Maybe there weren't actual words to explain what it felt like in the handful of minutes that she was _not_.

Not alive, nonexistent—not herself, anyway.

But she wants to _try_.

He's quiet for a long time, and then his eyes soften. "I guess that makes sense."

She breathes a sigh of relief, but realizes that she hasn't thought this far ahead; she hasn't figured out how to start this conversation that she wants so desperately to have. Between them, there is an unusual silence, broken eventually by Kristoff.

"Did it hurt?" His question surprises her, because it's the first time he's asked her anything about it, but she can't tell what he's thinking because he isn't looking at her; indeed he stares down at his lap and picks absently at a seam of his trousers. "Being frozen like that, I mean?"

She bites her lower lip. She always lies to other people about it, to keep them from being afraid of Elsa—of Elsa's…gift. But she can't and won't lie to Kristoff. "Yeah. I mean, not as much as _some things_, but it did hurt." She's pretty sure that nothing will ever hurt as much as watching Hans pour the water out of that pitcher onto the fire, but Kristoff doesn't know about any of that, and she isn't sure she wants him to. "Not the freezing. The, uhm, thawing. And the part _before_ the freezing."

"The freezing didn't hurt at all?"

"Well, it was weird. It wasn't like going to sleep or anything, 'cause I definitely expected to lose a hand when that sword came down. I mean, one moment I was there, and the next, I just…_wasn't_. Wasn't even _aware_. So no, it didn't hurt at all."

He looks at her then, eyes dark in the low lighting the stable loft provides. "Do you remember being frozen?"

"No. Well, when I thawed out, I knew that I _had_ been frozen, but I just—I don't remember actually _being_ an ice sculpture."

He looks away again, and then back. "Those five minutes were probably the longest in my entire life," he says, looking uncomfortable.

"I'm sorry." She wonders how many people were inadvertently hurt because of her.

"For what?" he asks, and lifts his arm to touch his own hair; she recognizes it as one of his nervous habits.

She sneaks in under his arm, pressing her face against the side of his chest. He smells a little like Sven and a little like hay, and sorta sweaty, but it's familiar—calming. "I don't know. It's silly. _I'm_ silly. It's not important."

"I think it is," he chides, and awkwardly settles his arm around her.

She presses her face against him so he can't see her face. "I'm sorry that I hurt you, even if it was for just, like, five minutes."

Kristoff's arm tightens around her in what she assumes is encouragement.

"It's just that," she continues, softly, "at the time, Elsa was more important. Than me. Because there wasn't a guarantee for my life. It was just a guess. A wild guess. I couldn't let Hans kill Elsa on the, like, off-chance of you being able to help me."

He doesn't say anything, and she doesn't either; her thoughts die in her throat before they turn into words.

Finally, after an eternity, when she's about to break into nervous laughter or maybe tears, he says, "You made the right choice."

She chews on her bottom lip for a long time before she presses herself against him in an unspoken request for him to hold her just a little closer. He obliges, and only then does she say, hardly louder than a whisper, "Even if I had been pretty sure you could have, um, thawed me, I would have still chosen Elsa."

He gives an exaggerated sigh that she can _feel_ and the next thing she knows, his hand isn't around her anymore; it's on her head and it's mussing up her hair. "You're ridiculous, you know that?"

"What?" she sputters, grabbing his hand in both of hers to pull it away from her now-ruined hair.

He just smiles and gives her a good-natured roll of his eyes. "Of _course_ you'd pick your own sister over some guy you just met."

His words make her feel guiltier than she wants to feel, remembering that dreadful coronation ball and Elsa's glove in her hands and the look on her sister's face just before she whirled around and ran. "I wish I'd done so earlier," she tells him.

Kristoff sobers immediately. "You couldn't have known," he tries, and gently frees his hand from her grasp. "Look, in the end you could have chosen between, uhm, trying to convince a second guy you just met to kiss you—in the hopes of it unfreezing you, of course—or saving your sister's life. It was brave of you to pick your sister." He tries to smooth her hair back down, and adds, his voice awkward, "People are… Well, lots of people would pick themselves over someone else."

"Not you," she says, to avoid talking about her bravery. The word implied some sort of planning beforehand; she had only acted. "You had about a million chances to ditch me and leave me to my fate."

"Common human decency," he mutters, and moves his arm back around her shoulders. "I don't deserve a prize for not being a jerk."

"I still appreciate it." She burrows back into his side as if to reinforce that fact. "And, um, I appreciate you listening, too. You always do. Even when it takes me twenty minutes to get to the point."

"Of course I don't mind listening to you. Ever. Are you okay?"

"Yes. No. I just—I don't know how I feel about not being completely ordinary anymore. Or if I should feel anything at all. I mean, does it even matter?"

"Anna." She pulls away and notices the little lines at the corners of his eyes that appear whenever he smiles. "You're still pretty ordinary."

"How many ordinary people do you know who've spent at least five minutes looking like a sculpture from a wedding ceremony?"

His smile grows. "Well, just one, but luckily she returned to her completely normal self, afterward. Well, as close to 'completely normal' as she was before, anyway."

"What are you trying to say?"

He gives a vague-sounding, "Hmm," and looks thoughtful.

Is he trying to flirt with her? She's not sure how she feels about this, but it seems like a nice way to end their conversation; she doubts she'll be thinking much about how normal she is or isn't if he kisses her.

Her arms loop around behind his neck and she tries to sound coy with a soft, "So you take back what you said about me never having been ordinary?"

"I haven't decided on that, but I happen to have heard from, well, _someone_ that you have a completely ordinary _weakness_—"

She shrieks as she feels his hands digging into her sides, and then they're rolling around in the hay together, her hands trying unsuccessfully to push his away. The only words she can get out of her mouth amidst the laughter that bubbles up are vague threats directed at her sister for daring to give away her secret and Kristoff for listening to her.

Kristoff doesn't bother to hide his amusement, but after a couple of minutes he stops tickling her and just looks at her. Anna uses this to her advantage, of course, and reaches her hands up to his hair, messing it up.

"Hey!" he protests, but she laughs.

"You deserve it," she tells him, but she can't hide the affection in her tone.

She wants to say _I love you_, because nobody but Kristoff makes her feel quite this way—safe and comfortable and _accepted_.

But she can't let herself say it just yet. So she settles for the next best thing and pulls him down so that she can steal a kiss from his smiling mouth. It's not difficult, with him lying half over her.

He pulls away after a moment, says, "See? Completely normal weakness," and tickles her one last time—for good measure, probably.

She snorts and wriggles away from his hands. "Elsa will pay for telling you about that," she's sure to inform him as she gets to her feet and begins to brush hay from her skirts.

He rolls onto his back and watches her for a while, smiling, before he asks, "Anna?"

"Yeah?" She glances up.

"Things change, but people don't. You're the same person now that you were before you were frozen."

The smile on his face is so reassuring it almost makes her want to cry.

Fortunately, only a heartbeat passes before he adds, "I don't know how ordinary that actually makes _you_, though, _feisty-pants_."

She laughs. "I guess it depends on how you define ordinary. Compared to Elsa, I guess both of us are _completely_ ordinary."

"That's true." He folds his arms beneath his head. "I like you just fine, though. Whether you're normal or not doesn't define who you are as a person." His face is red, but he doesn't look away. "I just, uhm, thought you should know that. Just in case."

"In case of what?" she asks, pulling hay out of her hair.

He does look away, then, face redder than she's ever seen it. "In case you might ever doubt, for even a second, that you're worth caring about exactly as you are."

Kristoff grunts in confusion when she throws herself at him, but his arms come around her anyway, catching her without hesitation yet again. "Thank you," she whispers, and squeezes him as tightly as she can.


End file.
